After the Apocalypse

In the beginning, there were only three of them, and I had met them quite by accident. The man sitting in the prow of the skiff was a short, brown-haired Englishman. He was smiling in a self-depreciating way. He was hunched forward, and looked a little gray. I thought he was scared but trying not to make a big deal out of it. I gathered he had been sick, although he didn’t say so directly. He looked a little like a refugee, I thought. It was some sort of thing about his heart, maybe? Not a heart attack, but perhaps angina. I was worried for him, and so was the red-haired woman he was with. (Going to France, pg. 121)

Maureen F.McHugh is a award winning science fiction and fantasy writer and After the Apocalypse is a collection of her short stories. I was quite pleased to see I had already read two of these stories before –  Special Economics and Useless Things – as they have appeared in himself’s annual “best of” collection he receives each year. What I like about these stories is their ordinariness. One story has vampires but they are not the focus of the action. Instead The Naturalist is about one man adjusting to his environment and observing what is happening around him. You could pick the man up out of his apocalyptic world and place him in the Amazon basin trying to survive the natural  world around him and determining what he needs to know to survive.

Many of the other stories are just a short step away in reality – economic collapse, avian flu, a dirty bomb – all things within easy reach in a reader’s imagination. The scariest story for me is Going to France quoted above. In this very short tale, strange things begin to happen, for no stated reason. The story abruptly ends with the reader knowing that life will never be the same and you are left not knowing how or why – you are left with a vague sense of unease.

These tales are about ordinary people in, what some would say, ordinary circumstances, trying to survive as best they can – just as people do everyday. But McHugh amps up the ordinary into something larger than life. For me, she was able to keep me reading, involve me in the character’s lives, made me care, all with an underlying sense of unease. And I was still able to sleep at night.

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